How a co-working space makes money on the desk you never use

A co-working space makes money by selling one seat to more people than will ever sit in it at once, so the member who pays and stays home is the best customer it has. That's my reading, not anyone's published accounts. Underneath it sits the real worry, which is that the rent doesn't care who turned up.

One seat, on the back of an envelope

Prices first. A Vulcan Post round-up listed Co-labs, a Klang Valley operator, at RM499 a month for a hot desk and RM699 for a fixed one. That was November 2023, and the article warns that these prices usually come with a "starts from" disclaimer.¹

Next, the floor. EdgeProp reported one Co-labs site in Damansara Heights at 15,407 sq ft, with a capacity of 256 seats. By my division that's about 60 sq ft a seat, and the site has meeting rooms and an event hall too, so not all of it is desk.²

Then rent. Knight Frank's figures, as The Star reported them, put average office rent at RM6.69 per sq ft a month in KL City and RM4.24 in Selangor, for the first half of 2025.³ Multiply by that 60 and a seat costs about RM400 or about RM255, in rent alone.³

One seat for one month, in ringgit

I don't know what any operator actually pays its landlord, because I couldn't find anyone publishing it. I'd guess it's better than average for a tenant taking whole floors. Then there's the cost of running the place, presumably staff, air-con, internet and coffee, and I couldn't find a Malaysian operator's breakdown of that either.

So why does the desk you skip matter?

Say you pay for a fixed desk and stay home. The operator keeps the money and, I assume, saves a little on air-con.

A hot desk is better still. Say you come in twice a week: on the other days your seat can go to somebody else, who is also paying for it. That's the trick, and a 2018 global survey by Deskmag gives it a size, an average of 1.2 members per desk.⁴

I expected more. It's old, it's worldwide and it blends every kind of desk, and I couldn't find a Malaysian figure. It does suggest the trick has limits.

The same survey found simple desk rental brought in about 32% of income, with private offices at about 27%.⁴ A locked room can't be sold twice, so my guess is operators like it for a duller reason: a company with its name on a door is less likely to wander off.

How full is full?

Selling a seat once matters more than selling it twice. A Co-labs director told EdgeProp that its five established sites averaged 75% occupancy, which is the operator's own number, from February 2024.² Its two newer sites sat at 50% and 40%.²

Back to the envelope, with a hypothetical KL City seat costing four hundred ringgit in rent. With three seats in four filled, each paying seat has to carry more than five hundred, which is already above that hot desk price. At the 40% mark it has to carry a thousand, and nobody has paid for the electricity yet.²

That's where the extra members per desk earn their keep. Here's how that figure looks beside ordinary offices.

How full, in per cent

What strikes me is how much empty floor there is in the city. The head of one property consultancy told The Star that older towers could become hotels, healthcare sites or co-working hubs.³

If my guess about bargaining is right, that helps an operator's rent. It also means anyone with an empty floor can try the same idea.

The big one that fell over

WeWork, the best-known name in the business, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US in November 2023. Its filing listed more than $18 billion in debt, NPR reported, and NPR described the core problem as heavy spending on long-term leases, with a plan to profit from short-term subleases.⁵

I don't read that as proof the model is broken. Most of its lenders backed a plan to keep operating, and very few operators carry debt on anything like that scale, I'd assume.⁵ But it's my envelope at a much bigger size: the lease runs for years, and the person in the chair can leave far sooner.

What I'd watch if it were mine

I'd keep two numbers apart: how many seats are sold, and how many people hold each one. The second can't rescue the first, so I'd treat a new site as months of paying rent on chairs nobody has bought, and I wouldn't open the next one until the last had filled.

If you're the one paying, go on a weekday morning before you sign. A seat sold more than once is fine until the day everyone comes.